4.2.16

THE BEATLES - Tribute Band in St Ives

I have neglected the blog in the past
week because my life has taken on a different pattern, and I need a bit of time
to adjust. Tomorrow we are off to Venice for a few days to celebrate our 25th wedding
anniversary, and because this is a mini-holiday I got to thinking about one of
my earliest posts, one I did before Just Backdated was launched and I used to
post things on Facebook. This is from September 2013, when Lisa and I were
spending a week in St Ives in Corwall and we stumbled on a Beatles tribute
band…

Across the harbour, as we neared the
pub, it sounded like ‘The Night Before’, the song from Help!, not the most obvious choice for a covers band, but when we
got closer they were playing ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret’ from the first
album, and then ‘We Can Work It Out’. When that switched to ‘You Can’t Do That’
Lisa and I had to go inside, and sure enough, on a Tuesday night in late
September, a local Beatles act called Not The Beatles was going through the
routine – Beatlemania era songs followed by Sgt
Pepper era followed by White album/Abbey
Road era, complete with appropriate gear, costumes and between song patter –
in the Lifeboat pub on the shorefront in St Ives. They weren’t the best tribute
band I’d ever seen but that didn’t matter as much as what they played and the
good humour with which the songs were delivered. The pub was heaving full, all
ages, from teens to grannies, and everyone stood to watch, having the time of
their lives, and I guessed that although the time of many of those lives would
have been the sixties, a good proportion had been born after John died, and
less than half could remember the time when The Beatles ruled the world.

In amongst the crowd, all
sweaty and mad for it, we watched and listened. They reeled off all the songs
you would expect, the well known (‘Paperback’, ‘Tripper’, ‘Submarine’) and some
you wouldn’t have (‘I Need You’, ‘Hide Your Love Away’, ‘I Should Have Known
Better’) and everyone in this pub sang along, word perfect, to every single
song, at the tops of their voices. During ‘Submarine’, sung of course by Ringo,
four or five girls at the front, in their twenties, held hands and formed a
line, clearing the floor as they line-danced back and forth towards and away
from the group. Paul, violin bass to hand, grinned while John with his black
Rikki leered, just as you would expect him to do.

After 20 minutes or so we left
to get some air and I had a pint of Guinness in another pub down the road,
still overlooking the harbour, and then we walked back to where they were
playing. This time it was ‘Lucy’, followed by ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Get Back’ and
then my favourite, ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, which was received like the number one
hit it ought to have been, and after ‘Obla Di’ and ‘Here Comes The Sun’ came ‘Yesterday’,
community-sung like a hymn to which everyone seemed to know all the words like
they’d sang it in school, and then we left the pub again and sat on a bench
overlooking the water and listened as they headed up the home straight, ‘All My
Loving’, ‘Revolution’, ‘Jude’ and, as I predicted, ‘Twist And Shout’. We’d
caught maybe half the entire set, probably missing the early stuff, ‘She Loves
You’ and ‘Hold Your Hand’ and some mid-period, which was a shame but then again
we’d no idea we’d stumble on the Fabs in the first place.

If ever proof was needed that
The Beatles are universally adored, here it was: big bald men with tattoos,
younger lads with their girls in low-neck dresses, white-haired men with their
wives of 30 years or more, older ladies for whom these songs brought back a
time when they would have screamed their heads off at them, likely lads and
sexy girls on the pull, tipsy holidaymakers up for it, middle-aged couples
enjoying the moment, even the odd dog, and me and Lisa, perhaps more critical
than most – “That guitar tone isn’t right,” I said at one point. “Shut up,”
said Lisa, grinning – and all of us in rapture to what surely has now become
the national songbook, the Beatles’ songbook, loved now and forever by everyone
of all ages from the tip of Cornwall to everywhere else.